Marketing with videos is such a fun and exciting way to engage, educate, and convert your ideal audience. Consider this. Would you rather read a long, boring sales page or watch a visually appealing video that clearly conveys the message? For most people, the answer is clear. That’s why we here at (Your Company Name) believe so strongly in the power of video to boost your business and generate revenue. In fact, using video for marketing is one of the very first practices we implement with our clients. After all, visuals are much more powerful than text. They’re certainly more memorable. And if memory serves, our clients are more likely to sign on the dotted line.
The last several years have seen video marketing surge to the forefront of the digital landscape. It now gives businesses the perfect means to interact with their audience in a way that is powerful, well-timed, and not intrusive like traditional marketing. In fact, by the year 2023, it is projected that 82% of all internet-based content will be video, making it a dominant format all the way around.
Businesses of all kinds can now use the powerful true nature of video to tell their brand story and connect with their audience and potential consumers during pivotal stages of the customer journey.
The video industry has recently become an enormous market force, one that corporations can no longer afford to overlook. Businesses and universities across the globe are gravitating toward video content. For companies, it is bringing a feeling of familiarity and trust to their brand. For academia, it’s changing the way educators teach and students learn. Both are reaping the benefits of sharing video.
There are few things more popular right now in online content than video. It has taken over and seems here to stay. It captivates because it’s a story being told with pictures and sound; it holds attention because it’s easy (and sometimes even addictive) to watch. And while that may sound like a pretty basic human appeal when it comes to consuming digital media, it’s really the most straightforward launchpad for understanding the benefits of video marketing that I can think of.
Boosted Engagement: Compared to text or images by themselves, video content does an even better job of catching and keeping people’s attention. This makes it the ideal basis for any kind of audience interaction, from podcasts to webinars to Q&As.
Having a video marketing strategy in place improves brand awareness because videos provide the opportunity to showcase a brand’s personality, values, and offerings in a way that is visually and emotionally captivating. In the hypercompetitive world of digital marketing, videos can be the crucial factor that makes a brand stand out from the rest.
Having video on landing pages can increase conversion rates, studies have consistently found. Video is just more persuasive and influential for most people. It’s easy to see why: Video combines sight, sound, motion, and emotion in a way that practically no other media can.
Boosted SEO: The visibility of your website can be taken to new heights with just a single addition. No, it’s not a paragraph of text—it’s a video. And this isn’t just a theory; videos really do work to increase your website’s SEO. When you use SEO, or search engine optimization, to your advantage, you make your website more attractive to the search engines that people naturally use today: Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
J.M. Johnson analyzed content on several social media platforms and found that it was the video that stood out on each. He found that videos consistently performed well on social media, generating more shares, comments, and likes than any other form of content. In fact, Johnson found that videos tended to reach a broader audience than even other exceptional forms of content.
The path to an effective video marketing campaign is not always clearly marked. It’s easy to throw money at a “viral” video that doesn’t garner the kind of attention some network television shows receive for individual episodes. In fact, there are five clear steps that anyone should consider before they create their first campaign: 1) Know the audience; 2) Know the end goal; 3) Take an inventory; 4) Consider the media mix; and 5) Develop a video marketing strategy.
To develop captivating video material, take time as you plan. It’s worth it to organize a calendar so that you know exactly when everything is going to be done. If you’re in a position to do so, set up a meeting with your team to decide what you want your video to look like. Will it be animation, a talking head, a walkaround office tour? What will the “next level” of your content look like? What do you want your viewers to come away with? Work through all these questions, and when you have clear (and varied!) answers, you should consider moving on to the next step: producing your video.
Understand the people you are trying to reach. What do they like? What are they interested in? What problems do they have? Your video should speak directly to these things.
Set Your Objectives: Decide on the specific outcomes you hope to achieve with your video marketing. These could be everything from increasing brand name recognition and boosting click-through rates to moving leads further down the sales funnel.
“Using human stories draws your audience in and taps into their emotions in a way that nothing else can. Whether you use real-life experiences to underscore a point, give an amusing anecdote to make people laugh, or inspire people to action by means of the power of example, narrative is the pathway to persuasion. It’s how we’ve been built to engage with each other and make meaning out of the world.”
Attention spans are shorter than ever, so it is important to keep your videos brief and direct to ensure that your audience stays engaged.
Make quality your top priority: Buy the best production equipment and editing software you can afford to make your videos look polished and professional. You want to show potential viewers that you’re worth their time from the very first frame and that you respect their investment in you.
Hint: Some really good-yet-affordable cameras to check out are the Canon Vixia HF R800 and the Panasonic HC-V180K.
For editing software, check out Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro X. Premiere Pro has an excellent user interface and is definitely a pro’s choice, but it’s also user-friendly. Final Cut is Mac-only but is an industry standard for video editing.
Being genuine is so, so critical in your videos. It’s the most basic rule and one that, sadly, can too easily be broken. When someone isn’t being real, you can feel it; and it can be gravely off-putting. By contrast, when someone is being honest and true in their artistic medium, it really resonates with us. That’s the type of connection you want your brand to have with its audience.
Improve search engine visibility and accessibility with a little search engine optimization (SEO). Use the right keywords in all of the right places: video titles, video descriptions, and video tags. And don’t forget about video transcripts and captions—search engines love that stuff!
In order to maximize reach and engagement, it’s important to share your videos on a variety of platforms. You should distribute your content across multiple spaces and places, including not only your website and your social media channels but also your email newsletters and video-sharing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.
Here’s the text rewritten: “Empower Interaction: Develop a strong sense of community by using a brand voice that encourages liking, commenting, and sharing among viewers. Engage with comments and, when appropriate, go back and forth with your fans/consumers inside the comment section for an awesome two-way conversation.”
When it comes to measuring and analyzing your videos, you want to use tools that will help you keep track of certain things—like how many people are watching your videos, how long they’re sticking around for, and how many of those people are actually being turned into customers. The most obvious of these is YouTube analytics, which gives you a ton of information about who is watching your content. Another good tool is Google Analytics, which can help you get a sense of what kind of people are watching your stuff from your various traffic sources.
In summary, it is clear that the research conducted supports the hypothesis that overnight sleep deprivation leads to impaired declarative memory. This is a significant finding because it offers the opportunity to identify with greater precision the effects of sleep deprivation on specific cognitive processes. Previous work in this area has produced mixed results. Indeed, quite a few studies have found no effect of sleep deprivation on cognitive tasks, whereas others have found substantial effects. However, few have used all-night deprivation as the experimental manipulation, making it difficult to draw reliable conclusions about the effects of sleep deprivation on cognition. The current study has sought to address that problem.
Today’s world is primarily digital, which begs the question: How can businesses engage with their audience, boost brand awareness, and most importantly, drive conversions? The answer is actually quite simple: video marketing. It is a powerhouse medium that, when harnessed and executed properly, more often than not yields satisfying returns.
That said, video marketing is a misleading umbrella term. Businesses must understand the reason and the rhyme behind engaging in this medium in order to really make that precious video content work for them.
